HiddenMysteries: 'Laughingstock' rebukes haunt Sen. Vitter now

John Hill

In the 1990s, when former Gov. Edwin Edwards was pushing gambling, young David Vitter used to say that EWE had made Louisiana "the laughingstock of the nation."

That line, repeated over and over in press releases during the period, came back to me last week, when a karaoke singer dedicated a song to Vitter: Stephen Stills' Love the One You're With.

The audience laughed and hooted.

L'affaire Vitter has fed the late-night television comics.
"He always selected the girl who made the lowest bid, so he's fiscally prudent," said David Letterman in a one-liner repeated on www.political humor.about.com.

"You think the Senator's embarrassed? How about the hooker? Now the whole world knows she had sex with a politician," quipped Jay Leno.

Vitter, who as a young state representative in the 1990s carefully concocted the image of being the Boy Scout of Louisiana politics, has turned out, as a U.S. senator, to be the Bad Boy.

Always known as a lone wolf, Vitter has no friends among his colleagues.

Even last week, most people believe that Vitter deliberately set his 5:05 p.m. press statement Monday to upstage U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal's statewide gubernatorial announcement tour.

On the previous Friday, Jindal had damned Vitter with faint praise, observed Shreveport political consultant Elliott Stonecipher. So Vitter set his press conference and knocked Jindal off the lead stories on all television stations and newspapers, and, while doing so, further linked the two together in the public mind.

At that press conference, Vitter painted the picture that he wouldn't answer the same questions "again and again and again and again." The trouble with using the word "again" is that there has to be a first time.

Vitter's wife, in characteristic prosecutorial overstatement, created the impression that the media had camped out in their front yard and at their church and had followed them around.

Blaming the media is a classic ploy when there is no other defense.

This is not the media's creation. The media didn't make David Vitter go to prostitutes, actions, by the way, that are criminal.

But, to quote Letterman:

"One thing I'll say about this guy from Louisiana, this David Vitter. At least he went to a professional and left the congressional pages alone."

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'Laughingstock' rebukes haunt Sen. Vitter now

Sunday, July 22 2007 @ 03:42 PM CDT